You're correct, I was referring to AlmaLinux's former status of being downstream of RHEL. Additionally, from Red Hat's perspective, AlmaLinux is still downstream of CentOS Stream (and thus a participant of Red Hat's vision for CentOS Stream[0]).
> red hat's vision of downstream OSes is they don't exist because that takes a nickel out of IBM's pocket
I think CentOS Stream actually contradicts this because (I would imagine) it's a lot of work to maintain and greatly benefits the community -- and Red Hat still makes it freely available for other distributions to base off of.
Technically code-wise we're a downstream of CentOS Stream for the most part, but the end result is more of a hybrid because we're targeting RHEL and can match commits to RHEL commits from stream for a lot of it...so yeah.
Formerly we were just 100% downstream RHEL with none of this nuance, as you mentioned.
> red hat's vision of downstream OSes is they don't exist because that takes a nickel out of IBM's pocket
I think CentOS Stream actually contradicts this because (I would imagine) it's a lot of work to maintain and greatly benefits the community -- and Red Hat still makes it freely available for other distributions to base off of.
[0] https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/furthering-evolution-centos-s...
EDIT: clarified RH's vision for CentOS Stream and added my thoughts on CentOS Stream